


"Fan" Is Short For "Fanatic"

by gisho



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Fandom, Humourous Fluff, In-Universe RPF, Trelawney Thorpe Spark of the Realm series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-03
Updated: 2018-03-03
Packaged: 2019-03-26 13:52:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13859097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gisho/pseuds/gisho
Summary: In which Gil Holzfäller is fond ofTrelawney Thorpe Spark Of The Realm, and Ardsley Wooster is fond of Trelawney Thorpe.





	"Fan" Is Short For "Fanatic"

\---

Over several months of gradually more pleasant acquaintance with Gil Holzfäller, Ardsley Wooster has learned many things about him that are, in all likelihood, utterly irrelevant. His particular animus for poorly-made wafflemakers, for example, which had combined with a Spark and a generous heart to leave improved versions at four restaurants along the Rue des Grenouilles. His paper-glider habit. His fondness for Trelawney Thorpe penny-sparklies. 

That last being the reason they're standing in front of Ambrosius Book Works instead of in their Wednesday-morning Hyperpersuasion lecture, avoiding each other's eyes. Not alone, mind you. This isn't Britain, there's no _queue_ , but there's a crowd.

Holzfäller breaks first, and claps Wooster on the shoulder with a grin. "Wooster! Didn't know you were a fan."

"I might be described as a fan." He is, of Miss Thorpe herself. She had taught him _so much_. But he could hardly explain that he admires Miss Thorpe for her knowledge of how to make explosives from ordinary supper ingredients, or that he was so eager to buy _Trelawney Thorpe and the Liverpool Leviathan_ because she'd said in her last letter the new writer was an improvement. "Not of such blatant ..."

"Popularity?" Holzfäller smirks. "Relax, they're probably all in diving suits in this one."

The gentleman next to them in the bowler hat visibly wilts at this idea. 

Wooster checks his watch. "We'll find out in seventeen minutes."

"Plus reading time."

"Given your habits, that means ... two hours at most?"

The bowler-hatted gentleman puts in, "I don't see why they wait for nine to open. There are twenty-four hour bookstores."

There's a murmur of agreement, although one prim blonde lady with a prominent British sigil pin declares, "Yes, but _those_ kind of stores havn't earned the _import license_." The voice sounds familiar. Wooster gives her a longer glance. Ah, so that's what became of Miss Witherspoon after the incident in Calais. He'll have to follow her home.

"Only because the English love their artificial shortages," snaps a lady with silver-beaded cornrows. 

Someone else mutters, "There's such a thing as quality -"

" - were British propaganda, getting more out -"

"You can't possibly think -"

Holzfäller leans close to Wooster as the argument spreads out. "How long do you give it until someone gets punched?"

As if on cue, the beaded lady knocks off the bowler-hatted gentleman's bowler hat with a swipe of her parasol. Wooster, Holzfäller, and a handful of other sensible people take this as their signal to slink into the shade of Ambrosius's famous glass awning. They even wind up in something approximating a queue. 

Less than a minute later the shop door cracks open. Dafydd, the clerk, leans out with a finger to his lips, then makes a beckoning motion. He must be feeling generous. That, or nervous. The queue by the wall file inside. The door clicks shut. Dafydd, still silent, smiles at them and points with a flourish to the table piled high with neat stacks of _Trelawney Thorpe and the Liverpool Leviathan_. 

A few seconds later, a cloud of purple smoke erupts outside. The silence lasts just long enough for everyone to process this. 

Then Holzfäller yelps, "Not _again,_ " and bursts out the door. 

Should Wooster go help? But a quick glance around assures him that Miss Witherspoon is part of the interior crowd, and for once discretion might be the better part of valour.

\--

Gil - who has become Gil in Wooster's mind if not his speech by relentless application of cheer, like an overgrown Moonbark Spaniel - is sulking. Wooster can't really blame him. They're covered in mud. They won't be much longer, though, with the buckets of rain being dumped over them. It makes him miss Londonium; it never rains in Londinium.

"And as if _that_ wasn't enough," Gil goes on, "we don't even know if that was the _whole cult_."

"The Ascended Master seemed to think it wasn't."

"The Ascended Master had been taking his own mushrooms. Which is another thing. The symptoms looked awfully like Verthurax's Glory, and if that stuff's got out of the Cold Storage the Master will have somebody's head on a stick." 

Wooster winces involuntarily. Simon Voltaire has the temper of a man who's spent three hundred years putting up with the absurdities of Sparks and artists

"I didn't get a sample either." Gil runs a hand through his hair, which manages to smear mud through it without, somehow, actually getting it out of his eyes. "Pity about the fire."

"If you hadn't set it, they might have succeeded in sacrificing Miss Zola," Wooster feels obliged to point out. "Surely saving an innocent woman's life takes priority." Gil is more sensible about that than most Sparks, but the point is worth constant reinforcement. 

Gil growls, "If she would stop listening to madmen -"

" - we'd never find them in time." Wooster raises an eyebrow, although it probably doesn't show.

They squelch on in mutual discontent.

Eventually Gil mutters, "I bet Trelawney Thorpe could have gotten Zola back and walked off with a whole bouquet of mushrooms."

"There's only so much impossible even a Spark can do," Wooster offers. He's loath to disparage Miss Thorpe, even by implication, but it's true. He eyes the nearest streetlight. It's the pale blue of past-curfew, which at least means the Master will probably understand if they go home and have a bath before making any more detailed report than the rather frantic one they'd left Zola making to the Anti-Fire Engines. "I doubt you could bend space enough to get my Electromedicine notes back, for example."

"Nope. Sorry." Gil taps his fingers on his elbow. "Tell you what, come back to my place and take mine, I was done revising anyway. I was going to spend all evening with _Trelawney Thorpe and the Wheel of Thunder_. Which we have now missed the launch for by twelve hours. _Bloody hell._ " The English swearwords drop into his despairing mutter like a pickled herring into a roux. "I don't suppose they'll have any _left_ we could break-and-enter for."

"Ah." Wooster coughs. "That won't be a problem. I asked Dafydd to set three copies aside."

"You what?" 

"Well, Miss Colette has expressed an interest in the -" 

He's interrupted by a strong pair of arms wrapped around his shoulders, hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs, and apparently heedless of the detail that they've turned onto the Rue Mouillé and people wandering out of restaurants are staring at them. "Wooster, you _wonderful man_." Gil beams at him, and then his grin sharpens a little. "So Dafydd does you favours? How'd you manage that? He's not your secret lover, is he?"

"Holzfäller -"

"Or, oooh, smuggling contact." Gil nods. "He's passing you messages in the books -"

"He's a friend and fellow countryman, and that's all there is to it," Wooster snaps. "Nothing wrong with helping a friend."

"Nothing at all. And we can pick them up in the morning and still be finished before the exam."

\--

Colette leans back in her chair so far it would be in danger of tipping over if she weren't Colette, and lifts her pen. "I don't know why they expect people to believe this."

"Everyone knows Sparks can do anything," Gil offers. Wooster ducks behind his upright copy of _Mechanicsburg Versus The Mongols_ and takes a surreptitious bite of cake.

"If that were true, either Europa would be a wonderland with lakes of beer and candy growing on trees, or a puddle of magma."

"Most people havn't thought it through that far." Gil waves his sandwich to emphasize the point. "I mean, sparkwork takes time, Sparks work on something for years and years and find a thousand ways for it not to work and _then_ they get the bolt of inspiration. They say in Beetleburg that Mr. Tock was built in a day. It's only the last bit anyone notices."

"Fair enough. But I'm not talking about hours of work after years of studying the problem. It would be fair not to narrate the years. I'm talking about a few minutes of work for something that should take hours, even for a Spark!" Colette slams her mug back onto the table for emphasis; luckily it's close enough to empty not to splatter. "I know Sparks, and there is no way, however strong, that Trelawney Thorpe could have built that autopilot in the two minutes Professor Milliway was ranting.It's just bad storytelling." 

"They're penny sparklies! They're supposed to be dramatic, not right!"

Colette presses a hand to her eyes. "Some of us like a little bit of realism."

"Adventures are always ridiculous. Come on, you were right there for that mess with the electric mice. You helped me overwind the things." Gil looked at them both with pleading eyes. "So were you, Wooster, don't you remember? Back me up here."

Wooster lets his book fall; clearly staying out of this was a lost cause. "Miss Thorpe is, in real life, one of the strongest Sparks in Britain," he informs them. It might or might not be strictly true, there were rumours and the actual results of the Biancan Test were of course a state secret, but she is certainly the strongest save of course Her Undying Majesty he'd heard of; that she still plays adventurer in times of need instead of vanishing entirely into The Office certainly bespeaks her unique and irreplaceable talent. It's a wonder she thinks he's worth cultivating. "I'm fairly sure _Ice Cathedral_ was based on a true story -"

"- very loosely," Gil and Colette chorus. This is not their first round of this argument.

"I'm sure Holzfäller could build an autopilot in a few minutes under the right circumstances."

Gil grimaces. "They would involve finding someone's lab where they'd been failing at an autopilot. And even then it would be slim odds. Clanks are tricky."

Colette leans over to retrieve Gil's abandoned pickle slice. "So there's really no excuse. You know what they need?"

"What?" It's Gil and Wooster's turn for the chorus. 

"They need _consultants_." She nods to herself. "People who've been adventuring. Who know how it works. We should write and offer."

"Oooh." Gil's eyes are alight with the gleam of a new idea. It's at moments like this Wooster is very glad that Petrus Teufel's carefully-hidden descendant has, from all evidence, inherited none of his sire's ambition. "Wooster, you can get the publisher's address, right?"

"I probably could," Wooster allows, "but I won't. They'll pay you no mind. It will be shattering. If they pay no attention to Miss Thorpe on such matters, why should they pay attention to you?"

Colette throws the pickle at him. "We can try."

"We could do our own series instead," Gil says with a grin. "The Entirely Realistic Adventures of Ardsley Wooster, Hapless Brit in Paris. D'you suppose any publishers would take it?"

"Try that," Wooster tells them, "and I'll stop making tea for you."

\--

It's ten in the morning when Wooster gets back into Paris, and thirty-four hours past the point when he would really have liked to get to bed. Well, he's missed two days of classes; he may as well make it three. He stumbles towards his flat, blinking in the sunlight. It's never this bright in Londinium. When he gets there the door is ajar. 

His heart thuds, and he slips his pistol loose. It can't be a professional. They'd have left the door closed. He nudges it open with his foot, standing just out of sight, and waits for a reaction.

A few seconds later, a familiar voice calls out, "Wooster?"

Gil. It's just Gil. What exactly is Gil doing in his flat? He makes the pistol vanish and steps inside. "Holzfäller? What is it?"

"Brought you something." Gil is sitting at his desk; he waves the something in the air. It's - _Trelawney Thorpe on the Trail of the Twelve-Mile Gun_. "Dafydd asked about you, you know."

"Just a little family emergency. All sorted." Wooster tries for a disarming smile, but he's tired enough he probably misses it. 

Gil tilts his head. "You look absolutely hedgerowed. Coffee or pillow?"

"Bushed," Wooster tells him, blinking. "The idiom is _bushed_."

"I know the idiom. Pillow it is." He shoves the book into Wooster's hands. "Trelawney will still be here in the evening." 

No she won't, Wooster wants to say, she's still in Calais decoding the scrolls. He can't say that. It would give the game away. He clutches the book and mumbles something approximately grateful as Gil leads him towards the bedroom, and closes his eyes just for a second while Gil is pulling his shoes off. He hopes there's no dried ichor left.

When he opens them again there's a sunset glow through his window, a dangling string next to his bed, and _Trelawney Thorpe on the Trail of the Twelve-Mile Gun_ tucked under his head like a pillow. There's a piece of paper stuck to the string. PULL FOR TEA, it reads. Oh dear.

But there's nothing to be done. He pulls. 

Something goes clunk, and something else gurgles, and then there's a series of mechanical noises that put an end to any notion of drifting back off. Wooster makes himself sit up and look around. The door is closed. His suitcase, which he'd, oh dear, dropped in the hallway and forgotten about, is beside it. On the bedside table, his autokettle, souvenir mug from the Sapphire Exposition, and an alarming assortment of tubes and valves not all of which he remembers owning, are settling down to a steady series of parps. Wooster blinks at it. Trelaw - Miss Thorpe would probably understand it at a glance. She would already be thinking of ways to improve on it. And she had still asked for him specially to help out in Marseille.

The other side of the paper says, _Midnight, Rosa Delacruz's? It'll be fun._

Gil's idea of _fun_ is different than most of the patrons at Rosa Delacruz's. Not that far from Miss Thorpe's, in fact. They might be out all night. He'll have to bring his pistol.

Well, Wooster thinks, if he starts now he can probably finish the book first.

\--

"You'd look good in it, though," Gil tells Colette. "I mean, green is your colour."

"That's not the point. I would attract entirely the wrong kind of attention." Colette sniffs. "I get enough of that already. What do you think those boys were thinking?"

"What do you mean? They were Trelawney Thorpe fans. Just like us."

"Gil, I adore you, but are you sure you're not at all piractical?"

"Huh? That doesn't - oh." Gil's face is slowly turning red. "I'm not, really, I just respect that you are, we've been over this. Fair enough, I see why you wouldn't wear it in public. But that is _not_ the only reason someone would want to see you dressed up as Trelawney Thorpe. Look at Wooster - how many times have you reminded us Miss Thorpe is a real person? It would be ridiculous to think about a real person you didn't know that way, right?" He turns the beseeching look on Wooster, with that air of help-me-understand-humans that he has sometimes, that makes Wooster wonder about his upbringing.

Right now, though, Wooster is thoroughly distracted by thoughts of Miss Thorpe, who's gloriously real, who he does know, and who is so far out of his league, as the saying goes, they might as well be playing different sports, for all that she seems to enjoy teaching him the tricks of their mutual trade. There's no direct line from code- cracking to love letters, however many lovelorn sighs he might give in secret after she hurries away.

"He's blushing," Colette ruthlessly observes. "I think he likes the idea."

Wooster stands up, with as much dignity as he can muster. "I'm going to check the post," he says, which is nothing like an exit line, but better to concede the point than dig himself too deep. "You two enjoy your dress-up fantasies."

"We don't have any, that's the point," Gil calls after him, but Wooster shuts the door very firmly behind himself. 

Downstairs, he fumbles open the brass mailbox labeled #17 with the clasp of his sigil pin, just to keep his hand in. He could do this particular lock in his sleep, after so much practice with it. The second evening post has come - of course it has, this is Paris, it's almost as efficient as home - and he flips through it. Letter from his uncle, advertising circular for fashionable toolbelts, advertising circular for Ambrosius Book Works on which Dafydd has scribbled a note that's probably significant, thin ivory envelope embossed with a winged castle.

His heartbeat speeds up a little. It would be ridiculous to get his hopes up.

When he gets back the argument has moved on. "Biology just doesn't work that way," Gil is saying. "They're usually good with the science, but if you overheat crocodile eggs you just ger crocodile omelette. Even if you're a Spark. There are actual _books_ about how to make dragons, they've even been translated into modern French, there's just no excuse for research that shoddy."

"Yes there is," Colette tells him. "You can't expect a British writer to speak French."

"Or the publishing house to have a research assistant who speaks French and can summarize? Or the writers to apply just a little common sense to the issue?" Gil is waving his hands yo eagerly Wooster is starting to fear for his potted fern, but he holds himself back and focuses on opening the letter without damaging the seal too badly. 

"Well, they're _writers_." Colette grimaces. "Zeugma and the Blanchard Process don't necessarily fit in the same brain."

"I know, I know, it's just ... I wouldn't have expected better from _most_ penny sparklies. Maybe we really should write our own. At least we'd know to handwave the egg thing with a chemical bath."

Colette considers this, tapping her fingers. "And we have enough adventuring experience to know how unrealistic it gets. It's not as if Paris has any shortage of publishers."

"Exactly! We can do the Brits one better!" Gil leans back in his chair, tipping it far enough that if Wooster tried it he'd unbalance the chair and crack his skull open on the edge of his desk, but Gil seems immune to problems like that. "Wooster! How do you feel now about being the heroic adventuring star of a penny series?"

"Less than sanguine," he admits, and hold up the letter. "Especially as I now have a real-world job waiting."

Colette blinks, then smiles at him -her warm, genuine smile, the one reserved for actual friends. "Congratulations," she says. Gil, less reserved, begins to clap. It really is amazing he doesn't fall over waving his arms around like that.

"Thank you." Wooster settles on to the sofa beside Colette, and smooths the creases out of his trousers. 

Gil thumps back to the floor, miraculously controlled. "When do you leave? I guess it's before summer term."

"I'm supposed to meet a supply ship in Stockholm on July seventh," Wooster tells them. "Holzfäller, you're here for the rest of the year, right? Will you be going back to Castle Wulfenbach as well?"

For some reason that makes Gil's face go shadowed for half a second, before it flickers back into a grin. "Maybe. We'll see. But I'll write you whatever happens. We should go celebrate!"

Half an hour later, they're at Le Triton Flambant with two Pink Ticklers and a gin-and-tonic, and Colette and Gil are cheerfully toasting _the best lab assistant the Baron will ever have_ , and _a steadfast companion in adventure worthy of Trelawney Thorpe_ , which makes him blush a little more than the gin can reasonably account for. Sometimes he wonders why exactly the daughter of the Master of Paris and the son of Petrus Teufel are so eager to keep him around.

Well. Because he works so very hard at being a supportive friend. The best possible sidekick, although they're too nice to put it like that. But he's done a better job at it than he dared hope, two years ago when they were just becoming acquainted.

\--

"Hyu got a letter," Costin tells him, and waves it in the air so everyone can see. 

Wooster forces a smile. He'd barely re-established contact with his superiors before the Jägers had found out and insisted on going with him every time he left the caves, to keep him safe, and honestly a Jäger alone was less conspicuous in the nearby towns. At least he was successfully conspiring with Miss Phedrian to keep the _other_ maildrop secret. "Thank you." 

"Also, Hy gotz you someting! Zince you likes dem so much!" Costin fishes in his pack, tossing out a handful of oranges - the children make delighted noises and pounce, which was probably the point - and a lurning wrench, which Adam catches without looking up from his soup, before producing a book. _Trelawney Thorpe și Conspirație Gamma_. 

"You ... how did you know I read those?" Wooster isn't sure whether to despair or delight. 

"Becawze Gil told uz." Right, Costin had been on Castle Wulfenbach, it was't inconcievable he'd gossiped with Master Gil, but Wooster is still trying to fit this idea in his head when Costin triumphantly unearths a second book, then holds it in the air. "Und Hy gotz this!" The cover is green, with yellow detailing, and the picture on the front even looks quite like Lady Heterodyne. He could imagine her cradling a deathray with a bright smile like that, although probably not with Castle Wulfenbach in flames behind her.

Oh dear.

He hopes that when she gets free of Mechanicsburg, Lady Heterodyne is as good-humoured about penny sparklies as Miss Thorpe. They don't need another giant puddle of molten radioactive lead like the one in Place de Verre.

"Hy vas thinking, later ve do a dramatik reading," Costin sayz. "For everybody. Hyu vant to be narrator?"

Adam does look up at this. "Actually I think I would prefer to do the reading, if Mister Wooster doesn't mind," he says. Wooster spreads his hands; he could hardly protest. This isn't _his_ story. "Right after supper, maybe?"

There's a general chorus of cheers, and a clattering of spoons as everyone under the age of twelve or over one hundred decides to finish supper as soon as possible. 

Wooster takes advantage of the chaos to quietly open his letter. It doesn't matter if he reads it in public. It will be in code, and everyone here knows he's a spy. The scrawl of _Mr. Jan Novak, Mulverschtag_ on the outside, though, is in handwriting they won't know the significance of. This is highly unofficial correspondence.

 _I hope this reaches you before the snows are too deep,_ Miss Thorpe opens. No fear of that; it looks to be a mild winter. They'll need it. But he should write back as soon as possible, just in case. _Lodinium has been so quiet I've resorted to going to plays for entertainment - the Siege of Mechanicsburg is naturally the topic on everyone's pens, and three terrible dramas about it and one quite decent one are making the rounds. Of course, the Office is keeping an eye on the unfortunate events in Europa, and it's only a matter of time until some crisis erupts in the erstwhile Wulfenbach Empire that Her Undying Majesty feels we can and should intervene in, if only for humanitarian reasons. I expect to be called away on a few hour's notice, so don't be too surprised if my next letter is postmarked Vienna or Venice or Vilnius. I wish you could be there with me. You always keep such a cool head when it matters._ He's not keeping a cool head right now; he must be alarmingly red. Good thing no one is paying attention. 

The letter goes on, _But I know how vital your current post is, even if those nincompoops at Aethling Street seem to think it's a punishment detail. Keep heart, my dear._

She can't mean anything by it. Miss Thorpe is only being friendly. Wooster tells himself this as firmly as he can. 

But it doesn't keep him from smiling. 

\---


End file.
